Lynn Harter, Ph.D.
Professor Harter is a curious and hopeful believer in the power of storytelling and art to nurture individual and communal well-being amid bodily differences and inescapable precarity. Informed by aesthetic and feminist sensibilities, her scholarship explores the conditions under which stories can unsettle inherited assumptions and gesture toward more just futures. Her scholarship is connected by several primary concerns: How is human flourishing interwoven with suffering? How do narrative and imaginative logics function in health organizing and public advocacy? What socio-material dilemmas characterize the pursuit of social change, and how are they navigated? In this work, storytelling is at once a meaning-making phenomenon of interest and a catalytic form of sharing knowledge claims. She is co-producer and director of the Emmy award-winning documentary series The Courage of Creativity and co-producer and host of Defining Moments podcast. She has authored of over 80 journal articles and book chapters and edited 4 scholarly books. Beyond her professional life, she is sustained by time in nature, shared meals, restoring old things to new lives, and the company of her human and canine family.
Specializations: Narrative Approaches to Health; Organizing for Social Change; Social Justice; Feminist Theory